Hey HN! My name is Brit Cruise and I'm the lead content developer on the Khan Academy side of this equation (working alongside Tony DeRose from Pixar...plus a village of others), if you have any specific questions about this project I'll be happy to answer as best I can.
I brought a computer graphics textbook into my high-school math class and asked my teacher if he could help me figure it out. His response was that I needed to pay attention to the current lesson plan, and would need to get through trig, then calculus before we could approach the book.<p>What's amazing about this video series is that they have actually captured the elements that _can_ be taught to kids of various ages and skill levels. Man how I wish there were a resource like this when I was younger.
Love this. So important to show kids that there really are applications for the stuff they are learning in math classes, and computer graphics are such a direct way to see that connection. As a kid, I think the main reasons I cared about things like equations of motion or trigonometric functions were because I was using them to do stuff like animate bouncing balls.
I think the name "Pixar in a Box" sounds like a neat play on words on the term "Particle in a Box" from quantum mechanics. Sometimes, it's called an "infinite potential well".<p>So the title appears to come from the suggestion that there'a a well of infinite potential in terms of creative usages of math in computer animation. Or at least that's what I read into it.
It's interesting that the Rendering chapter only covers ray tracing, while most classic Pixar movies were actually mainly rendered using the Reyes algorithm, which is a form of rasterization.
Wonderful initiative -- wish this was around when I was in school.<p>Any projects in the works to tie this into Khan Academy's CS offerings? I work at a school which is about to pilot a programming class with 3d animation, but I found the content which you guys have put up to be far more engaging. If there were an accompanying suite where students could code and render an entire scene (especially if some Pixar assets were included!) it would absolutely be incredible and a great resource, and I certainly wouldn't hesitate one second to transition our course into it.
Nice! I was just thinking about using CG as an enticement to teach linear algebra. Basically, turn the curriculum upside down: here's how you rotate an object ... a point is a vector .... here's a matrix ...<p>That's how I learned it.
Love Khanacademy, I wish I can bookmark course like this for later viewing, could not figure out how to do that yet. I'm a coach there but like to bookmark course for myself once a while.
FYI the image formatting is off on mobile chrome. <a href="http://imgur.com/0dyvQJP" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/0dyvQJP</a>